Ulta3 Spring/Summer 2011 collection Part 1

Last week I discovered that my favourite little cheap chemist brand had released a new spring/summer collection.

Usually Ulta3 polishes are just jumbled up in a great big white tub at the entrance to a chemist, and you have to rummage around through all the bottles to search for a colour you might like. This time around however, they were actually in a plastic display unit, displaying four of each colour. Check out this pic of the display unit posted by Shamisen on the Vogue forum. It actually looked much more up market than I usually expect of Ulta3.

Here are all the new colours. There are eight of them, which I will split into two posts.

Blue Marlin - three coats, no top coat. Photo taken outside, but no sun (although you can see the pretty clouds reflecting on my nails). This one is almost a blue jelly, but with less than three coats it was a little streaky. Fantastic colour and it didn't seem to stain nails either.

Frangipani - three coats, SV top coat, full sun. Bright yellow, but not fluro like Citrus but brighter than Honolulu. This was thickish and streaky, but the finished mani is really great. I've finally added another yellow to my polish collection. I think this officially makes 4 yellow polishes that are purley yellow, not gold.

Sunset pink - three coats, SV top coat, full sun. Bright pink with blue tones, almost fluro. Amazing colour saturation with this one. I feel a little like a five year old wearing this, and that i should be wearing hot pink leggings with sequined shoes.

Tangelo - three coats, SV top coat, full sun. Bright fluro orange coral pink.

When on the nail, I immediately thought that Tangelo was a dupe of Tahiti. Tangelo is a margin paler, but not so much that you actually can tell.

I'm actually really loving these colours. They are bright and they certainly make me feel warm and summery. I guess it helps that it was 27 degrees here yesterday!

These polishes are now made in China, not Australia, which is a bit of a bummer, cause I loved being able to wear a cheap Aussie made polish. The bottle lids are also slightly different, the top edge is slightly rounded now and the white cap is slightly more translucent. I found the brushes to be really stiff and really hard to work with. I don't know if it was because all of these colours felt rather thick or if it was the stiff brush, but I found that the brush left deep ridge stroke marks in the wet polish. These marks generally leveled out as the polish dried, but there a few fingers that stayed a little bumpy and needed top coat to make them look smooth.

If anyone wants to see a comparison swatch between any of the new colours and the existing colours, please let me know.

I'll show the remaining four colours tomorrow.